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Class with loads of methods to deal with dates

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There are countless standard functions to make calculations with dates. There are too many of them, they are redundant and, in many cases, they are obscure or impossible to understand. I’ve been meaning to insert an article here with a list of the most useful ones. But now it’s no longer necessary.

How to debug a job

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Here’s a simple way to start debugging a job: Go to transaction SM37; Click on the job you want to debug; type JDBG in the command line (without /) and press ENTER; and… bang! you’re now debugging the job. Thank you Ricardo Monteiro for the tip. And thank you Ingolf for the photo. Greetings from Abapinho

Shortcut for time travelling

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Some months ago I showed how to transform the debugger into a time machine. Today’s tip is simple but useful: there is a keyboard shortcut which makes it even simple to travel in time: shift + F12 Just place the cursor in the line you want to travel to and then… shift+F12. Thank you Maxsuel Maia for the tip. Greetings from Abapinho.

Use a password manager in your life

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And there you go, if you read the title you know the hint.

Now, here are some hints about the hint:

I'm 5 years old!

Hello, my name is Abapinho and I’m 5 years old. I’m still growing up. Thank you to everyone who visited me during my short life and a special thank you to all those who participated with tips, ideas and posts. Greetings from me, Abapinho.

Abapinho's best practices

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Recently, I have compiled a set of personal best practices. I decided to share them here by creating a new category (which will soon appear on the menu to the left) into which they will be grouped. The original idea was to make a PDF file but, since they are constantly being reviewed and expanded, this was largely impractical. As such, they will be published one by one. The goal is for these practices to be visible in their entirety as a user-friendly, accessible reference.

The ABAP detective

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When a development is completed in SAP, the time to send it to other systems where it can be duly tested and then executed by users has finally arrived. Before that occurs, however, it has to be checked for lapses, errors and other problems that could lead to our programmes behaving in an unpredictable manner. There is a very useful tool that allows some of these errors and gaps to be filtered out. It is called ABAP Code Inspector.

Close the frozen window

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How many times have you been left with a “hanging” window when you end a debug?

Exemplary example of SALV

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Unless you want to do data editing, the only dignified way to use ALVs these days is through SALV classes. They are more modern and more elegant, and those who use them can achieve a social status until now only available to owners of a license plate.

Hold on… but not yet

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You are doing a LOOP AT in a 1000-line table, and you know that you want line 853. Until recently, you had two options: either hit F8 852 times, running the risk of hitting it 853 times and having to start all over again, or create a watchpoint with the condition SY-TABIX = 852 or something close, and pray that it worked.

Now you have a third option.

APPEND LINES OF class->method() TO itbl

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ABAP is getting smarter all the time. Back in my day, no one did anything with it. And now, slowly, more than a fifth of a century late, it’s trying to imitate C and Java, and becoming more flexible.

I was going to do something like this:

Automatic keyboard

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Every programmer knows about the intimate relationship between batch-inputs and paperweights, staplers and similar heavy objects. These precious little helpers can keep us from spending up to eight hours hitting the “ENTER” key with one finger.

Although these objects have a certain charm, the law of gravity - the same one that makes them useful - sometimes makes them fall over and stop pushing this key.

Adding values to a standard domain

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If you think it’s impossible to add values to a standard SAP domain without requesting an activation key, you’re wrong.

ABAP sucks

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Go to the ABAP Editor (SE38) and check out line 323 of standard program RCIFCUST. If you’re lazy, here it is: SAP programmers are wild. Thanks Brian Wolfe for the photo. Greetings from Abapinho

Always use message classes in exception classes.

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Exception classes let you state multiple texts describing the different possible errors that they can represent.

However, there exists an option to associate it with a message class (SE91). This allows texts to be defined as classic SE91 messages instead of being defined directly in the exception class. And it has advantages.